All posts filed under: Amazon

Originally posted on The Scribble Bug: Source: The New Republic, Dustin Kurtz Time Magazine might have thought it popped up by surprise, but in reality Amazon’s first physical bookstore has been a long time coming. Yes, you read that right. Amazon’s first physical bookstore. To be exact, they’ve opened a 5,500-square-foot bookstore, carrying a not-that-impressive 5,000 to 6,000 titles with 15 employees under the direction of Amazon Books Vice President Jennifer Cast. It’s also in Seattle (so most of us don’t have to worry too much just yet). However, if you’ve paid any attention to the larger book world of late, you’ll realise those usually soft susurrations of discontent are more like a cacophony of squawk boxes (and far more rancorous). Because bookstore owners loathe Amazon. Everyone knows that. They undercut the cost of books through ecommerce, drove more bricks-and-mortar shops out of business than can be counted, and upended the bookselling industry. That’s before they branched out into publishing, whereupon they pissed off the rest of the book industry as well. With this in…

Originally posted on cup of tea with that book, please: I thought this news report would mix well with this week’s Weekly Tea Discussion. As reported by the Wall Street Journal: When the world’s largest publishers struck e-book distribution deals with Amazon.com Inc. over the past several months, they seemed to get what they wanted: the right to set the prices of their titles and avoid the steep discounts the online retail giant often applies. But in the early going, that strategy doesn’t appear to be paying off. Three big publishers that signed new pacts with Amazon— Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group, News Corp ’s HarperCollins Publishers and CBS Corp. ’s Simon & Schuster—reported declining e-book revenue in their latest reporting periods. “The new business model for e-books is having a significant impact on what [the big] publishers report,” said one publishing executive. “There’s no question that publishers’ net receipts have gone down.” A recent snapshot of e-book prices found that titles in the Kindle bookstore from the five biggest publishers cost, on average, $10.81,…